No Arabic abstract
Multi-stage forceful manipulation tasks, such as twisting a nut on a bolt, require reasoning over interlocking constraints over discrete as well as continuous choices. The robot must choose a sequence of discrete actions, or strategy, such as whether to pick up an object, and the continuous parameters of each of those actions, such as how to grasp the object. In forceful manipulation tasks, the force requirements substantially impact the choices of both strategy and parameters. To enable planning and executing forceful manipulation, we augment an existing task and motion planner with controllers that exert wrenches and constraints that explicitly consider torque and frictional limits. In two domains, opening a childproof bottle and twisting a nut, we demonstrate how the system considers a combinatorial number of strategies and how choosing actions that are robust to parameter variations impacts the choice of strategy.
Learning from Demonstration (LfD) provides an intuitive and fast approach to program robotic manipulators. Task parameterized representations allow easy adaptation to new scenes and online observations. However, this approach has been limited to pose-only demonstrations and thus only skills with spatial and temporal features. In this work, we extend the LfD framework to address forceful manipulation skills, which are of great importance for industrial processes such as assembly. For such skills, multi-modal demonstrations including robot end-effector poses, force and torque readings, and operation scene are essential. Our objective is to reproduce such skills reliably according to the demonstrated pose and force profiles within different scenes. The proposed method combines our previous work on task-parameterized optimization and attractor-based impedance control. The learned skill model consists of (i) the attractor model that unifies the pose and force features, and (ii) the stiffness model that optimizes the stiffness for different stages of the skill. Furthermore, an online execution algorithm is proposed to adapt the skill execution to real-time observations of robot poses, measured forces, and changed scenes. We validate this method rigorously on a 7-DoF robot arm over several steps of an E-bike motor assembly process, which require different types of forceful interaction such as insertion, sliding and twisting.
Consider the problem of planning collision-free motion of $n$ objects in the plane movable through contact with a robot that can autonomously translate in the plane and that can move a maximum of $m leq n$ objects simultaneously. This represents the abstract formulation of a manipulation planning problem that is proven to be decidable in this paper. The tools used for proving decidability of this simplified manipulation planning problem are, in fact, general enough to handle the decidability problem for the wider class of systems characterized by a stratified configuration space. These include, for example, problems of legged and multi-contact locomotion, bi-manual manipulation. In addition, the described approach does not restrict the dynamics of the manipulation system to be considered.
This paper presents Contact Mode Guided Manipulation Planning (CMGMP) for general 3D quasistatic and quasidynamic rigid body motion planning in dexterous manipulation. The CMGMP algorithm generates hybrid motion plans including both continuous state transitions and discrete contact mode switches, without the need for pre-specified contact sequences or pre-designed motion primitives. The key idea is to use automatically enumerated contact modes to guide the tree expansions during the search. Contact modes automatically synthesize manipulation primitives, while the sampling-based planning framework sequences those primitives into a coherent plan. We test our algorithm on many simulated 3D manipulation tasks, and validate our models by executing the plans open-loop on a real robot-manipulator system.
We present a Virtual Kinematic Chain (VKC) perspective, a simple yet effective method, to improve task planning efficacy for mobile manipulation. By consolidating the kinematics of the mobile base, the arm, and the object being manipulated collectively as a whole, this novel VKC perspective naturally defines abstract actions and eliminates unnecessary predicates in describing intermediate poses. As a result, these advantages simplify the design of the planning domain and significantly reduce the search space and branching factors in solving planning problems. In experiments, we implement a task planner using Planning Domain Definition Language (PDDL) with VKC. Compared with conventional domain definition, our VKC-based domain definition is more efficient in both planning time and memory. In addition, abstract actions perform better in producing feasible motion plans and trajectories. We further scale up the VKC-based task planner in complex mobile manipulation tasks. Taken together, these results demonstrate that task planning using VKC for mobile manipulation is not only natural and effective but also introduces new capabilities.
Planning for robotic manipulation requires reasoning about the changes a robot can affect on objects. When such interactions can be modelled analytically, as in domains with rigid objects, efficient planning algorithms exist. However, in both domestic and industrial domains, the objects of interest can be soft, or deformable, and hard to model analytically. For such cases, we posit that a data-driven modelling approach is more suitable. In recent years, progress in deep generative models has produced methods that learn to `imagine plausible images from data. Building on the recent Causal InfoGAN generative model, in this work we learn to imagine goal-directed object manipulation directly from raw image data of self-supervised interaction of the robot with the object. After learning, given a goal observation of the system, our model can generate an imagined plan -- a sequence of images that transition the object into the desired goal. To execute the plan, we use it as a reference trajectory to track with a visual servoing controller, which we also learn from the data as an inverse dynamics model. In a simulated manipulation task, we show that separating the problem into visual planning and visual tracking control is more sample efficient and more interpretable than alternative data-driven approaches. We further demonstrate our approach on learning to imagine and execute in 3 environments, the final of which is deformable rope manipulation on a PR2 robot.